Goals for the New Year

One of the goals for the new year is to have a monthly challenge running as well as some annual ones. This month's challenge is to keep the grocery spending as low as possible. Groceries for us includes household stuff like toilet rolls and cleaning materials and MasterShoestring's school lunches. We have an overall budget of £170 a month and I would like to spend much less than this in January. MasterShoestring's lunches cost at least £10 a week, depending on how hungry he is and sometimes more, so that decreases the budget quite a bit and we still have MissShoestring at home this month as well, so quite a challenge ! I'll be reporting on how we are getting on every Monday in January.

The first thing I did was inventory all the food in the house and then make a menu plan for the whole month. I did not do a bulk shop but have decided to only buy what we need and run out of once a week. This will stop me going to the shops and then picking up extras. I have also hidden various stocks, like chocolate, in places where people can't find it ! This ensures that only the weekly quantity is consumed over the month rather than all eaten at the start !

We have MrShoestring's birthday towards the end of the month and I've already got a haggis and a birthday cake planned ! So if everything goes to plan it should work very well !

Short term goals for the first 6 months include saving £600 towards our Scandinavian holiday and putting another £250 towards my course fees for next year. I'm also hoping to cut down overall spending to £17000 a year. There are a few unknowns, such as what MasterShoestring will be doing after GCSEs, which might mean that we have additional expenses, so I'm not being too rigid about the figure. Also MissShoestring is still living at home and all those hot showers and lifts to the station add up ! We have a plan and I'm quite excited to see how it all works out !